Carnival Club clients, staff and volunteers had a wonderful time at the Glasgow Style Mile Christmas Carnival on Sunday 26th November 2017. The annual Carnival brings music, dance and spectacle to the heart of Glasgow. It was an afternoon of amazing performance, thrilling costumes and enchanting acts. We braved the cold to display Carnival club's most recent artworks along the city centre streets and finished up among the Christmas lights of the very festive George Square. The crowds were lining the streets, and the group's various creations - including a huge planet, Jack Skellington, and a variety of elves - were a huge hit! This year we were able to go bigger and better, as the team from our bike workshop in Maryhill brought their tricycle to carry the rather large Christmas tree!
Special thanks go to Gregor Murray of Man with a Van Glasgow who very kindly donated his services and enabled us to get our precious artworks safely back to the Common Wheel arts workshop, where they are now on display. Thanks also to Iain G. Farrell who acted as our official Common Wheel photographer for the Carnival and got us some wonderful pictures of the afternoon.

Common Wheel participated in the Merchant City Festival procession in Glasgow city centre on Saturday 22nd July. We displayed our most recent Carnival Club creation ... a giant Mr Kibble, inspired by our trip to the Glasgow Botanic Gardens! He was definitely a huge hit - even featuring in a number of selfies! 

This year's sponsored music improvisation marathon on Saturday 25 March was the best yet! We are grateful to Glasgow University for the use of their Concert Hall again.   We had a few new participants including 'The Buddy Beat' - a whole group of drummers - as well as some familiar faces. You can listen to the music on YouTube. Some spectacular fundraising including one really generous donation saw us hit a record total for this event; not all added up yet but it will be over £3600 including the gift aid! A huge thank you to all the musicians and sponsors :-)

Common Wheel musicians worked with Gartnavel Royal Composer in Residence, Andrew Cruickshank, on a new composition . The work was performed in 'The Hub', Gartnavel Royal Hospital on Thursday 15th December 2016 in front of a full house. 2:02 explores the theme of Time, and the lyrics are taken from the many pieces of creative writing submitted from hospital patients, visitors and staff.  The themes include reminiscence, memory, religion, working life, stillness, recovery, age, youth, mortality, nature, medication, dementia and philosophy. We owe a debt of gratitude for the huge amount of creativity and thought contributed via these writings. The Gartnavel Royal Composer in Residence project is running from 2016–2018 and we anticipate to premier another work in December 2017. This years piece can be heard on soundcloud. 
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One of our fantastic bike participants put Common Wheel forward for a BBC Radio 4 'All in the Mind' award and we were shortlisted as one of three UK based organisations to win the 'Project Award'. Claudia Hammond visited the project to record interviews for her programme on 27 April 2016 and the BBC invited our representatives to the award ceremony in London where we were to find out who had won. Common Wheel were the overall winners! The award ceremony was broadcast on 28 June.

We did it again yesterday! Another 10 hours of continuous improvised music in Glasgow University Concert Hall. There were some new faces and some familiar faces in the ensemble, but all the music was completely new. Many thanks to all who participated, and also to everyone who supported the event!

Recognition! In October 2015, Common Wheel won the Evening Times Glasgow Community Champion Award (North-West Sector) in the 'Health and Wellbeing' category - full report in the Evening Times. 
The finalists from all over the city were invited to an event at the City Chambers on 3 December, when Common Wheel was declared the overall winner in the category.
As Emma put it: "People don't join the voluntary sector to make lots of money - they do it because they love it and because they can make a difference. The thanks they get come from nights like this." (Evening Times report).

This was another successful event with over £1000 raised. This year two of the Trustees made it more challenging by riding their classic Flying Scot bikes round the 110 mile Sportive course.  Awesome!